Consuming information around a news story is difficult. For example, for a prominent news story, there may be thousands of news articles published by hundreds of publishers. Further, in addition to traditional textual news articles, today's media landscape further includes news content in different media formats such as videos, blogs, social media posts, etc. that are scattered across the web and not consolidated together in a single place.
Distilling the information from this large number of different sources is an extremely challenging task. In particular, gaining a nuanced understanding of a news story involves not just reading one article but having enough information regarding different perspectives around the news story to make a well-informed judgement about the issues underlying the news story.
Currently, there is no simple yet effective way for a user to get a sneak-peek into the content present in content items around a story that helps the user identify, understand, and read interesting documents. For example, in certain existing systems, a user is provided with only a list of unrelated news articles and the user must examine each different article to determine whether the article relates to a topic in which the user is interested in understanding. If the article does relate to the topic, the user is then required to load and read the whole article to understand its content.
Thus, it is difficult for users to understand all the dimensions of a story. A typical user is busy and does not have the time to scout the Internet for relevant information to be well informed about a news story.